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On the way home from work, stopped in at the convenience mart to buy a couple of milkshakes. Chocolate for me. Vanilla for Young Ken Mannion who I knew would still be up and in need of a fortifying snack after another long day of being 17. Wears a body out.

Girl working the counter said, “You’re my last milkshakes of the night so I’m going to really hook you up.” Behave yourselves. She meant she was going to pack the cups full of ice cream. Which she did. But then she got worried she’d overdone it. So she was extra careful about placing the shakes on the machine and watched them closely as they spun.

“Last week,” she said as she watched, “I had one explode on me.”

“Oh no,” I said.

“It went everywhere. On the walls, on the customers, on me. It was all over me. I was covered in chocolate from my eyes down to here.” She made a chopping motion across her thighs. “I was drenched with chocolate milk shake.”

“Did the customers laugh?”

“Yes. They were real good about it.”

“How many of them whipped out their cell phones and took your picture?” I asked.

She started to say something then she froze. He smile changed to a look mixing amazement with annoyance.

“You know what? None of them! Nobody did!” She put her fists on her hips. “Nobody took my picture like that. What was wrong with those people?”

If ever you’re asked to provide a two-word Latin summary of Sex at Dawn, try this: Homo hypersexualensis. Though not deployed by authors Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha, this phrase points acutely to their central theses...Read the rest of Barbara J. King's review at Bookslut.

Henry James made fourteen visits to Italy, his first in 1869, his last in 1907. His travel essays were first printed in magazines, and some collected for Transatlantic Sketches (1875) or Portraits of Places (1883). In 1909 William Heinemann published all the Italy essays as Italian Hours, complete with an index. Yes, it was a marketing ploy to make the volume something travelers would bring along to consult during their own travels. It's a Lonely Planet guide for crazy English majors!...Read the rest of Mrs Peel's post.

72: The percentage of British government budget cuts estimated to be born by women, prompting the women's advocacy group The Fawcett Society, to file "an unprecedented complaint with the nation's high court this month arguing that the government failed to consider the effect on women of its leaner 'emergency budget'.""The government is under a duty to look at its policies and check whether they are likely to widen inequality," said Anna Bird, head of policy for the Fawcett Society. "We do not think they undertook that task when putting forth the hardest, most austere budget in generations. Women are going to be adversely affected as a result. That should not happen."...Read the rest of the McEwan's post at Shakesville.

An evening at the Thee-uh-tuh for the Mannions last night. Shakespeare. Sort of.

Well, sort of sort of. The Bomb-itty of Errors, the hip-hop adaptation of The Comedy of Errors we saw at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, was more truer to the spirit of Shakespeare’s play than some of the museum-piece, word-for-word faithful, perfectly in period productions and high-concept, let’s make Shakespeare relevant to modern audiences exercises in directors’ and designers’ vanities I’ve seen. The hip-hop was good, the rapping was clever, the performances were excellent, and…

It was funny.

But this post isn’t about that. It’s about this.

Before the lights went down and the show began, I was reading through the program which does triple-duty as the program for the three plays in rep at HVSF this summer, Bomb-itty, Troilus and Cressida, and Taming of the Shrew, and includes, besides the cast lists and production credits, notes to the audience from each play’s director.

And the director’s note for Taming of the Shrew started off like this:

The Taming of the Shrew has been pleasing audiences for 400 years. And, why not? Tame a spirited woman, break her spirit, starve her, deprive her of sleep, train her to obey---what could be funnier?

At the start of the play, Kate is a mean-spirited, temper-tantrum-throwing, vindictive, selfish, jealous, spoiled little rich girl.

She is smart and witty but she uses her intelligence to devise ways of terrorizing her family and her wit to insult and brow-beat and bully everybody she comes in contact with.

And she hurts people.

As in she slaps them, pinches them, kicks them, throws things at them, and breaks things over their heads.

I can’t tell you how many directors, actors, college professors, and just plain Shakespeare fans, I’ve listened to tying themselves into intellectual knots trying to explain away Katherine’s shrewishness as an independent and intelligent woman’s understandable rebellion against the political, cultural, and economic constraints on a woman’s autonomy in Elizabethan England.

I know, you could write a book. Books have been written.

But there’s this. How does her rebellion justify her torturing her sister?

In one of her earliest scenes Kate drags Bianca on stage by the ear, after having tied her hands, and then proceeds to humiliate her in a dialog that comes titillatingly close to a lesbian S & M game.

When her father tells Bianca’s suitors he won’t let her get married until he’s found a husband for her big sister, he’s actually begging them to help him get this crazy lady out of his house.

But there’s more to it. Baptista can’t let Bianca get married first because Kate won’t allow it. She’s too jealous and selfish to stand to see her sister happy and successful. She makes it clear that if Bianca marries and moves out first, she’s going to make things even worse for Baptista.

She is not nice.

Which is oddly part of her attraction.

But she can’t go through life like this because she’s a danger to herself and others. Plus, she’s miserable.

Oh, and did I mention that The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy?

A particular kind of comedy. A farce. Which makes it practically a live-action cartoon. Worrying about Katherine’s emotional and physical well-being after she’s “tamed” as if she’s a real person is kind of like worrying about Woody when he falls off the roof in Toy Story 3.

Besides, if you’re going to worry about Kate as if she’s a real person, or at least a character in a realistic drama, then you should worry about the other characters that way too.

In production, the actor playing the suitor will stagger out on stage with a prop lute down around his ears or his head sticking up through a hole in a broken-necked, unstrung guitar, at which point, if you’re thinking of this is a realistic play, you ought to be thinking, “Somebody get this poor guy to a hospital!” and “How come Kate isn’t being arrested for felonious assault?”

But nobody worries about Hortensio needing an X-ray and stitches. Most of the audience is thinking the dolt deserved it.

Kate deserves a good spanking. She doesn’t get it. What she gets is actually far more and worse than she deserves. She spends several scenes in the middle of the play facing the prospect of a life married to a madman.

The humor isn’t in watching Kate get “tamed” or having her spirit broken. Her spirit isn’t broken. If anything, her spirit strengthens. It just takes on a different, larger, more sympathetic character---sympathetic, as in she begins to sympathize with people she used to treat horribly. The humor is in Petruchio’s madman act, in his antics as he goes about “taming” her by showing her what life with her was like for everybody else.

Kate is “tamed” when she realizes that from other people’s point of view she’s been behaving like a madwoman.

The rest of the director’s note is a long apology---a long, long apology---for Kate’s final speech, the one in which she ostensibly makes the case that a wife’s proper place is on her knees in submission and gratitude to her husband, and an explanation of how he went about making the speech politically palatable to a 21st Century audience.

Look, if you’re worried about how you’re going to make the speech politically acceptable, don’t do the play.

If you feel you have to apologize for your female lead, don’t do the play.

The question is how serious is Kate herself in that speech? Has she truly been “tamed” or is she being ironic? Is she trying to pull a fast one on Petruchio and the other representatives of the patriarchy onstage or is she sincerely promising to be a good little domestic angel of the house?

Does she mean it or is she kidding?

Of course she’s kidding!

Like I said, it’s a comedy!

Her final speech is the closing gag. Husband and wives in Shakespeare’s day were rolling in the aisles of the Globe. Or would’ve rolled, if the Globe had aisles. The idea that wives are and ought to be subservient and totally submissive to their husbands is a joke that goes back to the Greeks at least. “Yeah, right,” would have been the standard response in 17th Century London.

If you want to know how Shakespeare and his audience viewed how a typical middle-class marriage worked, see The Merry Wives of Windsor. Mistresses Page and Ford run their domestic worlds, and their husbands are along for the ride. The measure of a happy marriage was how cheerfully and contentedly a husband could say, “Yes, dear.”

The cliches of TV sit-coms are not new. Shakespeare’s audience would have got Everybody Loves Raymond.

And of course all the men onstage, except Petruchio, take the speech seriously. They’re idiots.

Petruchio, however, should see exactly what Kate’s up to.

So should the audience.

She’s not just joking. She’s flirting.

With her husband.

Kate isn’t promising to be obedient. She’s telling Petruchio that she’s truly changed. She’s developed a sense of humor to match her wit and to match his. From here on out she’s going to play along. And that doesn’t mean she’s going to pretend to be a good little wife, meek, obedient, and totally undemanding. It means she’s going to be play-ful generally. She is going to enjoy life, control her temper, treat people the way she wants to be treated herself, and, by the way, with that in mind, the last speech is a call on Petruchio to do the same. And he agrees.

Kate ends her speech down on her knees but she needs to be there so that Petruchio has to bend to lift her up to her feet, and up to his level, for the final kiss.

And that kiss isn’t her reward for being a good girl. It’s the real kiss that seals their wedding vows. They’re both finally responding to “You may now kiss the bride.” This scene is the wedding that traditionally ends a comedy.

It’s a happy ending, not the conclusion of a tract on Elizabethan marriage.

If you don’t see it as a happy ending, you don’t see Taming of the Shrew as a comedy, which means you don’t think Shakespeare knew what he was doing, so don’t do the play.

If, however, you make the play funny enough, and cast the right actress as Kate, nobody’s going to care about the political import of the final speech.

Then you can use your director’s note to explain why you set your production of an Italianate farce in the cantina on Mos Eisely or in Paris during the Occupation.

A high school production of Taming of the Shrew, a hundred years ago. There’s a blogger you know in there somewhere in one of the comic servant roles he was famous for. One summer, a growth spurt, and a halfway decent haircut later he was playing John Proctor in The Crucible.

There are Serious People in Washington seriously looking forward to the Republicans taking control of Congress in the fall because they fully expect that the Republicans will not be able to do anything except make sure that President Obama can’t do anything.

The prospect of Senators Angle, Paul, and Buck doesn’t frighten them. If anything, it amuses them. Nutcases make great news copy and titillating gossip. The Serious People are counting on the cynics and corporate stooges who manage the elite’s business in the Senate to keep the nuts in line. Look at the House. How much trouble does Michelle Bachmann really cause?

Their only disappointment with Angle, Paul, and Buck---and you can throw in Senators Rubio and Toomey---is that none of them look as good as Bachmann in a skirt.

The Serious People know that a Republican Congress even if well stocked with Right Wing nutcases will accomplish next to nothing over the next two years but neither will President Obama. Which is fine. The corporate elites who run the country will get done what they want to get done.

The Bush Tax Cuts will be made permanent.

Social Security will be “saved” in some way that makes sure that no rich people’s taxes are raised and, with a little luck, actually cuts the amount of money businesses have to kick in and even makes some rich people richer.

But it won’t be called “privatization.”

Restraints on corporations will be loosened again.

Obama will have to appoint more corporate friendly judges.

Our giant imperial military will continue to keep the world safe for international corporate business interests.

In short, nothing is going to change. It will be business as usual and things will go on the way they’ve gone on for the last 30 odd years.

The danger a Democratic Congress and a Democratic Senate posed to the corporate elite has always been potential not imminent.

There was always the chance that Nancy Pelosi might get real control of her caucus and Harry Reid might grow a spine.

There was always the chance that the liberals in the Senate might rebel and change the rules so that the majority actually ran the show and Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, and Blanche Lincoln were reduced to the irrelevancies they deserve to be.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, that the Democratic Party, which mainly represents the urban centers on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts has been at the mercy of Senators from Montana and Nebraska.

You could take the entire population of Montana and combine it with the population of Nebraska and bus them all to Manhattan and they’d get lost in the crowd.

There was always a chance that the people of New York might notice this unfairness and start demanding that their Senators do something about it, like having one of them challenge Harry Reid for Majority Leader.

Fortunately, it’s looking as though the people of Pennsylvania have decided that instead of having their interests in the hands of Senators from Montana and Nebraska they want them placed in the hands of Senators from Kentucky, Alabama, and South Carolina. It’s possible that the people of Washington State and even California are deciding they want to be represented by Senators from the South too.

Which is to say in the hands of other corporate flunkeys who won’t have to worry about having their committee chairmanships taken away by obstreperous liberal colleagues.

So come January all will be as it should be as far as the Serious People are concerned.

The corporate elite will continue to run things but with less worry.

The rich will continue to grow richer.

The middle class will continue to shrink.

American business will have a larger pool of anxious, desperate workers who will be glad for any job they can get at any pay with the barest minimum of benefits.

And if it all goes to pot again, well, then President Obama or some other naively “responsible” Democrat can be allowed to take office and clean up the mess in a way he or she will get no credit for because no credit will be deserved because it will be done by punishing the middle class, again, and then it will be back to business to usual, with the Right Wing propaganda machine making sure that Americans blame each other for the mess.

I don’t travel a lot. I don’t have a long commute on a train or subway. I don’t live somewhere out of easy reach of a bookstore or a library. I’m not a student or an academic so it wouldn’t save me from having to lug around a lot text books and journals (although I’m not sure there are enough of those available in the right formats to even make that a consideration). I don’t spend a lot of time anymore poolside, at the playground, at soccer practice, or any place where my main reason for being there is to keep my ears open to the sounds of kids getting into trouble.

And because I don’t need one I can’t justify buying one.

But, trust me, as soon as I can convince myself I need one, I’ll own one.

I’d “own” even more books that I’m never going to finish or even start than I do now.

Buy an ebook from Barnes and Noble and you own it until the silicon chips decay.

Buy the paper and glue artifact at Barnes and Noble or from Barnes & Noble online and you got two weeks to return it or exchange it and I can’t tell you how often I take advantage of that policy.

Not nearly as often as I should have taken advantage of it, but still.

A quick search through our bookshelves and the dozen boxes in storage would turn up dozens of books I’d be surprised I own and couldn’t understand why I owned them and couldn’t remember how and when I came to own them.

“Why in God’s name did I ever think I’d want to read this?”

And librarians across New York State and down on Cape Cod, the ones who don’t hate me outright, at any rate, think I’m a nuisance, an amusing and somewhat pathetic nuisance, but a nuisance nonetheless. I can’t help myself. If I read a book review and think, “This sounds interesting,” or if someone recommends a book to me, I put it on reserve at the library as soon as I can and, since I never go anywhere without my netbook nor stray far out of range of a WiFi router, that often means immediately.

The hold shelves behind the circulation desk at the library here in town groan daily under the weight of stacks of books I’ve requested. I routinely check out ten or so books at a time and wind up reading none of them.

Usually, by the time they’ve arrived I’ve forgotten why I thought I’d want to read them and have already found ten or so other books I’m more interested in.

I’d be in a lot of trouble if every time I read a review or received a recommendation that made me think, “This sounds interesting,” I was able with the click of a mouse make it appear instantly on my kindle or nook.

So I guess the real Reason Number 4 I won’t own a kindle or nook even though I think both are really cool is:

I don’t have the strength of character a kindle or nook owner needs in order to avoid bankruptcy.

And by the economy I mean us not the money making system the technocrats in Washington and the business schools and the thieves on Wall Street and the predators in the corporate boardrooms serve and service.

I’m not looking forward to the day when libraries and book stores disappear and another whole swath of the working force is made obsolete.

So, if I had a kindle or a nook, which are both really cool, every time I downloaded a book I would be reminded of It’s A Wonderful Life.

You know. “Every time a bell rings it means an angel gets its wings.”

“Every time a book gets downloaded a clerk in a bookstore loses her job.”

The thunk of a hundred and fifty dollar piece of plastic and glass hitting the floor after it slides off the bed as I’m drifting off to sleep won’t be quite as satisfying and reassuring as the thunk of a book doing the same.

A few months ago, I spent a Sunday morning in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart on Thomas Road in East Phoenix, just on the cusp of the immigration flare-up over racial profiling and Arizona's repressive law called SB 1070. It was quieter then -- a weathered 39-year-old Mexican in a wool cap with a New York Mets logo named Roberto Valdez told me of his trek across the desert to seek work in Phoenix as a day laborer. Weeks earlier, Mexican day laborers like Valdez had been harassed on the weekends by angry white nativists, but in March of 2010 the nativists had moved on. Many had joined the Tea Party, and some were campaigning for GOP anti-immigration zealot J.D. Hayworth for U.S. Senate. Why waste time on "the Other" Roberto Valdez, when America now had "the Other" daring to occupy the Oval Office in the person of Barack Obama.

The first thing to know about Wee Willie Winkie is that it isn’t a Shirley Temple movie that happened to be directed by John Ford; it’s a John Ford movie that happened to star Shirley Temple. What makes it such a good film is that Ford doesn’t condescend to the material or the star. He shot it with the same loving attention to detail and deep, beautiful precision that would characterize Stagecoach two years later. And the themes that Ford, via Kipling, brings to bear-–the civilizing influence of women and children, sacrifice, courage, respect between enemies—-are also familiar from countless other Ford films.

Is he thirteen feet tall from heel to the top of his head or thirteen feet tall from the tips of his pointed shoes to the tip of his pointy cap?

KERHONKSON — The gnews is gnot good for Chomsky, the giant garden gnome.

For four years, the 13.5-foot icon that stands astride at Homegrown Mini Golf and Kelder's Farm on Route 209 has reigned supreme as the world's tallest garden gnome.

Now, according to Guinness World Records, Chomsky has been out-talled by not one but two newcomers: a 15-footer from Iowa State University and an even taller 17-foot, 8-inch fiberglass model from Poland.

Chomsky, as is his wont, had no comment on his comeuppance. But the woman who made what he is — artist-in-residence Maria Reidelbach — had plenty to say.

Hi I’m Oliver Mannion and I need help. Two of my favorite games of all time are the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic games. However I can’t install them on any of our computers because I get this message:Component: Default component File: D:/data2.cab Error:The device is not ready

I have not found a way to deal with this. If anyone gives me the way to solve this I will do a review of the games. Thank you for your help.

On a side note Heroes has been canceled so I can no longer to live blogs of it. If they make made for TV movies I’ll live blog those.

Not in remorse - The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Unlike Larkin though, my mind does blank in remorse at the good not done, the love not given, the time torn off unused. To distract myself from dwelling on those thoughts and of that sure extinction that we all travel to, I tried to read myself back to sleep with Jonathan Mahler’s Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning.

Bad move.

Good book, lousy decade.

New York City in the mid-1970s?

To start with there’s the horror of facing the fact that thirty-odd have passed since then. Talk about time being torn off unused!

But never mind the evil actors creeping around. David Berkowitz hasn’t appeared yet but the story is moving steadily towards the Summer of Sam.

At three AM, it’s just as appalling to be dragged back into the company of obnoxious and pathetic personalities who have faded from the public memory, thank goodness, but who dominated the news back then---Abe Beame, Billy Martin, Bella Abzug, anybody and everybody who thought it was cool to frequent Plato’s Retreat or cruise the abandoned docks along the West Side Piers---and re-watch the rise of other, even more obnoxious personalities who would dominate the news in decades to come---Ed Koch, Rupert Murdoch.

You can make the case that some good things came out of the 70s. There was a lot of great music, although most of it was crowded into the early and late years of the decade, with disco, Heavy Metal, and John Denver and the Electric Light Orchestra clogging it all up in between. A whole slew of classic movies got made, one of them being Star Wars, which supposedly ruined everything for everybody as Hollywood gave up making quality films for adults to devote itself collectively to producing nothing but blockbusters targeted at adolescent boys. Then there were all those pioneering TV shows, M*A*S*H and Mary Tyler Moore and Saturday Night Live and Laverne & Shirley and Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company and Love Boat and Fantasy Island and…and…um…What was my point again?

But a decade that began with Richard Nixon in the White House and the Vietnam War still raging and ended with Jimmy Carter trapped in the Rose Garden, 51 Americans held hostage in the Embassy in Tehran, and the first cases of AIDS being diagnosed, with Watergate, the Oil Crisis, and double-digit inflation defining the years in the middle, has got to rank as one of the very worst of all the decades in American history that did not include the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II.

To top it all off, it was a decade of deliberate ugliness passing itself off as cool. Ugly clothes, ugly hair, ugly furniture, ugly cars.

On a personal level, though, for someone like me, a middle of the night re-immersion in the 1970s is like deliberately giving yourself a nightmare about being back in high school except that all the surreal dream images are actual memories and instead of finding yourself standing in front of the room in your underwear you’re standing there in suede crepe-soled shoes, corduroy bellbottoms, a mustard-colored polyester shirt with collar wings that reach to the shoulders on either side, and a Shaun Cassidy haircut.

For the record, as soon as I started buying my own clothes so that my wardrobe was no longer exclusively birthday and Christmas presents from well-meaning parents and grandparents who assumed I wanted to wear what the other kids were wearing---my poor sisters had it even worse---I ditched the bell bottoms and polyesters for straight-leg jeans and cotton Oxfords with button-down collars so there was no more danger of a lift-off in a high wind.

I stuck with the Wallabees until the mid-80s though.

And I had a pretty good time in high school. College? Not so much. Not to begin with. Which might go a long way towards explaining why I don’t like to stroll down that particular stretch of memory lane.

But here’s the thing.

Another reason I don’t like to remember those times is that I have a very hard time remembering those times clearly.

I don’t mean in the sense of veterans of the 1960s who say, “If you remember the 60s, you weren’t there.”

I mean that two obstacles get in the way of my seeing that time in my life objectively and through my own eyes.

The first is my temperamental proclivity for remembering bad times more than the good. Even in the warm light of midday, my mind blanks in remorse at the good not done, the love not given, the time torn off unused, and given that the 70s were the years of my all too typical protracted adolescence, there’s a great deal of good not done, love not given, and time torn off unused for my mind to blank in remorse at.

But the other one is that I can’t “see” those years in the way I see just about every other time in my life.

There’s too much media blocking my view.

Notice I said “media” not “the Media.”

When I “picture” those times to myself I literally see pictures, the faded ones in the family album---another thing to hate about the 70s, the ruin of color film---and the ones I saw on television.

Instead of being able to call to mind my own memories I seem only able to conjure up documentary evidence that events I ought to have memories of actually happened.

I can look through my mind’s eye and see up and down the street I lived on when I was in kindergarten. I look through my mind’s eye for the street I lived on when I was in high school and see the photographs in the family album. I can look through my mind’s eye and see the blonde coming up the aisle on our wedding day. I look through my mind’s eye for the girl I took to the senior ball and I see her in the snapshot I used to keep in my wallet, posed in her parents’ living room before I arrived to pick her up, so I’m not even in my own memory of my own senior ball.

When I try to remember what I thought and felt about Watergate, I see Sam Ervin and John Erlichman verbally jousting on the TV set in the school library annex.

When I try to remember what Mom and Pop Mannion looked like back then I see Bob Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette, which as anyone who knew them when can tell you isn’t all that farfetched. Newhart has always been my first choice to play Pop Mannion in the movie.

My inability to actually remember the 70s has always troubled me because there are a lot of nice things that happened I would like to be able to look back upon and take pleasure in remembering. There are good people who have since passed out of my life whose kindnesses and friendship I should never forget.

And it would be helpful, not to mention more enjoyable, if I could read books like Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning with both more objectivity and a more personal engagement.

I think I have a plan for dealing with this.

Fight media with media, fiction with fiction.

My idea is that instead of simply resisting the archival sort of images that keep getting in the way of the “real” images of actual memories, I might be able to jog more of those actual memories by reminding myself what the 70s actually looked like as they happened by watching a lot of movies from the period.

But only a certain sort of movie.

Obviously not movies like Chinatown or McCabe and Mrs Miller.

But not ones set in the then present that were overly stylized because of their genre---like The French Connection, The Exorcist, Jaws, even The Goodbye Girl and Rocky.

And not movies that tried too emphatically to capture the spirit of the moment or say something about the issues of the day. Nashville, Coming Home, The Candidate, Network, Shampoo, Deer Hunter, Saturday Night Fever, and Taxi Driver fall into this category. Good as those movies are as movies, trying to get through them a sense of what it was like to be living in the 70s is like trying to get a sense of what it was like through a museum exhibit or an entry in an encyclopedia. There’s a didactic note in all of them and the filmmakers use the 70s as a prop to help explain…the 70s.

Which is why I wouldn’t put All The President’s Men in the group.

All The President’s Men is about current events, of course, but its focus is actually on Woodward and Bernstein as reporters as working stiffs not agents of history. It’s a movie about doing a job. In a way, Watergate is the movie’s McGuffin, its excuse to tell the story and the story is how these two guys go from door to door and office to office chasing down clues to a mystery their job requires them to solve.

The 70s as an historical event or a series of unfortunate historical events are almost irrelevant. They’re just there because they’re there. The camera can’t help taking them in but nothing much is made of them. They’re the given, which is how people living through a particular time period tend to see it, which is to say they take it for granted.

And that’s what I’m looking for. Movies in which the 70s are taken for granted. Movies that present the clothes, the cars, the furniture, the affects and mores, the way people saw them at the time most of time, as just there.

Topicality and topical references and in-jokes don’t automatically exclude a movie from the list. It’s a matter of degree and approach. And all genre pictures aren’t exercises in style.

So a film like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore which was topical at the time because of the effect of Feminism on many women’s lives would still make the list because an early 70s version Feminism itself isn’t the reason for telling Alice’s story, not the way an anti-70s Feminism is pretty much the excuse for Kramer vs Kramer, which is only one reason that piece of sentimental claptrap is off the list.

By the way, follow the link up there, then let me know if you were surprised to be reminded who directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Meanwhile, What’s Up, Doc? has to be scratched because it is so self-consciously a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s that nothing on the screen actually looks contemporary, it all looks made-up for laughs, even the jet planes. But The Hot Rock, which is genre two-fer, a farce and a heist movie, locates itself comfortably and naturally in 1970s era New York City, without any of the self-consciousness or self-congratulation of either Annie Hall or Manhattan, two movies that have to go on the list.